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Militaries fear that painful images can sway public opinion on the wars they sell – war photographer

Militaries fear that painful images can sway public opinion on the wars they sell – war photographer

They
say a picture is worth a thousand words – and that goes double for the
works of war photographers. Is there catharsis to be found in the
tragedy captured by a camera lens? We asked Zoriah Miller, who has
documented the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, and many other places.

Sophie Shevardnadze: Zoriah
Miller, award-winning photographer who put himself in the line of
danger to document wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza – welcome to the
show. It’s great to have you with us, can’t wait to talk to you. Zoriah,
you say that you always do your best to portray the reality of what you
see. Are you remaining an impartial observer of the events that you are
shooting?

Zoriah Miller: Yeah, I think
“impartial” is something every journalist strives for. It doesn’t mean
that I’m not emotionally invested in what I photograph. Obviously, I am a
human being and I have opinions on what I see and I have opinions on
what is right and what is wrong and injustice, and I’ll obviously try
everything I can to bring injustice to light. I suppose my definition of
injustice is my personal opinion, so I am impartial, but I do have
feelings and I follow those feelings and I hope to try to portray them
in the photographs that I capture.

SS:
I suppose what you’re saying being “your personal opinion” are the key
words. Does personality hinder you in telling a story as truthfully as
you can? Does it get in the way?

ZM: No, I
think that’s one of the common misconceptions in journalism, it’s that
having feelings and having emotions and caring about a story is going to
hinder your ability to capture that story or make you impartial. I
think you have to have feelings, especially for this type of
photography. When you’re with a family after they’ve lost a loved one or
in a situation where people have lost everything, I think it’s
impossible to not have feelings about it, and when you do see pictures
from people that go into those situations without feelings you can see
it in the imagery, they’re not able to capture the emotion of these
situations. It’s important to feel and I don’t think it’s necessary for
journalists to go into a situation without any opinions of their own.
You can go into a situation and have an opinion on what is right and
what is wrong, and you can still be open to every side of the story and
to every side of the argument. As long as you’re willing to accept at
some point if you’re wrong, if you see something that goes against your
beliefs, you capture it anyway and your beliefs change, I think that’s
good journalism – not just walking into a situation trying to be as void
of any thought process or any feeling on the subject matter. That just
ends up being cold in my opinion.

SS:
Photography only captures a split second, and so it leaves a lot out of
context. Has it happened to you that the story your pictures were
supposed to tell was interpreted falsely? How do you deal with those
context challenges of your trade?

ZM: Yeah,
absolutely. I had a situation in which – I don’t remember, I was in one
of the bigger magazines in the US, either Times or Newsweek, I can’t
remember at this point – they wanted to use a photograph that I’d taken
in the Gaza Strip with some militants who were building tunnels under
the border. Primarily these tunnels were being used to bring over
medical goods and aid and basic everyday needs for the people in Gaza
and yes, weapons did cross these tunnels at times, and I understand
that, but they wanted to use the picture in the context of illustrating
terrorism. Luckily, my editor at the time told me what they wanted to
use the photo for and I said that that’s not the context this photo was
taken in and I decided not to allow it to be published. Of course,
especially when you’re working for international media organizations and
photo agencies, oftentimes you don’t know which photos of yours are
being purchased, you don’t know how they’re being used, and that was one
of the biggest reasons why I decided to become even more independent
than I already was and start to have my own blog in which I could
actually post the photographs that I took and give the context that I
saw them in, that I photographed them in, and let people know how I
interpreted the photos and how the people that I was photographing felt
about their situations so that it wasn’t completely left up to other
people, how these photographs were portrayed.

SS: The
Time magazine gathered, I remember, 100 most influential photos of all
time, and those pictures are mostly political and military ones, like
the coffins covered with US flags or the children fleeing from a napalm
attack. Why are we, as humans, most affected by such grim visions – is
it about compassion, a lust for tragedy, or both? I always wonder why?

ZM: You know, there’s the old saying
that the editors used to use which is “if it bleeds, it leads”, meaning
if there’s blood in the photograph it’s going to be the lead photograph.
I don’t know, I would say it’s partially human nature, I would say it’s
partially the dramaof the photograph. I think that’s
one of the amazing powers of still photography, it’s really able to kind
of capture a mood and a feeling and portray that to people in a way
that oftentimes video doesn’t give quite the same emotion. Why so many
of those photos are the really difficult ones? I suppose it allows
people to kind of put themselves in other people shoes, like “what would
it be like if that was me in that situation where I didn’t have access
to food or water or, you know, I was injured in that way, or a family
member, a friend was injured in that way”. Most people do have some
compassion and some ability to feel what others feel. I would say that
probably a lot of those photos really have an emotional impact on
people.

SS: I always wonder when I
look at those pictures – because some are obviously much more horrifying
than other – where is that fine line that you draw when you say “when
it bleeds, it leads”?This question might sound a little
harsh, but when you do blood and gore so close up, are you afraid it
might look like “suffering porn” instead of what you want it to look
like?

ZM: I think that there are people who are
going to look at images in different ways. My goal was always just to
show what I saw, to show what was actually there, especially in war
zones. I don’t think most westerners have any idea what that situation
is like, and media doesn’t do a good job portraying it. We’re always
trying to censor things, we’re always trying to dumb stuff down. The
bottom line is that a newspaper with a really graphic photo on the cover
is going to make people call and complain, it’s going to make
advertisers complain. They don’t want to be selling a Rolex watch or a
Lexus opposite a page of someone suffering and dying. I think we’ve
gotten really used to things being dumbed down in the mainstream media. I
didn’t want to dumb things down, I wanted to just capture what I saw,
and not only that, but capture what soldiers were seeing. Especially at
the time when I was in Iraq and Afghanistan you know soldiers were
coming back with severe PTSD and people didn’t really understand what
that was or how it happened, and then the media wasn’t helping that at
all because people see these very, kind of, vague photos of what’s going
on in a war zone, and I just wanted to show what I was seeing and what
other people were having to see and experience in this situation. I
remember years ago I was doing some stories on AIDS orphans in Cambodia.
We’re talking about rural areas and in a lot of these places kids don’t
have money for clothes or when they’re quite young they run around
these orphanages without clothes on. I was getting hate mail and death
threats for having these pictures in news stories because people were
saying “These pictures could be used by people that are into child
pornography to look at these in a sexual way”. My response was – a
photographer can’t be fully responsible for the way individuals see
images. We have to do our best to portray things, obviously I wasn’t
photographing these in any type of a sexual way, it was young kids
playing and that’s often the way they play in other countries. The fact
that somebody could see that as sexual I think is beyond the scope of
what a photojournalist can worry about.

SS: You
mentioned your work in Iraq – back in 2008 you were embedded with the
US troops there but were kicked out after you took photos of dead
soldiers. I know there were bans on photographing coffins flying into US
from Iraq as well. Why be so afraid of what is after all just images?

ZM: I
think, like I said before, images do have a power. They affect people.
If you look back to the Vietnam war and the images that started coming
out of Vietnam, they had a great way in changing public opinion on that
war and making people go into the streets and protest and start to
demand that the US withdraw from that war. Militaries around the world
have taken those lessons and they’ve seen what photographs can do and
what the media can do to affect people opinions, and that’s what we see
all around the world – every year the job of journalists,
photojournalists, any type of videographers, writing journalists, their
job gets much more dangerous every year because so many people see what
we do as threats, threats to whatever their narrative is, whatever their
propaganda is. Like anything in our culture, the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars had to be sold to the American people and it obviously wasn’t what
the government wanted to portray. There was pain and suffering and
pointlessness and despair. That doesn’t fit in with the narrative that
they want to portray to continue selling that war.

SS:You’ve
been saying that a war photographer wants to get an image that will
stop the war. But images can’t really do that, can they? Look at all the
amazing images we had from the Vietnam war, from the Iraq war for that
matter, and none of that really helped stop anything…

ZM: Yeah,
it’s true, and it’s something that I realize more and more as I go on
in life, but I don’t think it’s a reason to quit. There’s lots of things
we do every day in this world that don’t necessarily have the end
outcome that we want them to have. Doctors will try to save people’s
lives that are horribly injured and lot of times that doesn’t work, but
sometimes it does. I think it’s not a reason to stop trying. Whatever
images we get from war zones and we show to people, it will have some
effect on that person, and it might not be immediate and stop that war,
but maybe if there’s enough information out there, maybe if people see
this enough, their decisions might change over time. It’s an idealistic
approach and I don’t know if it’s right or not, I don’t know if it’s
worth the cost of what we pay to be war photographers but I think that
it’s worth trying. If people had to live through these things, the least
we can do is acknowledge them, look at them. If my country is in a war
that’s taking people’s lives and ruining them, I feel like the least we
should do as a society is acknowledge that and see that it’s happening.
Even if we don’t do anything – we should do something, but even if we
don’t – we should know that it’s happening, we should know what it looks
like and we should try to imagine what it feels like.

SS: Do
you feel some kind of an extra responsibility when you take pictures
the way you do, with your influence, since your work can change things
around, affect many minds? Even if it’s not stopping wars it makes
people aware of what’s going on. Is that a burden sometimes, or do you
manage to stay only about catching the moment?

ZM: I
guess there’s two answers to that story. In the moment you’re just
focusing on doing everything you can to capture that moment in the best
way that you can – you’re paying attention to light, you’re paying
attention to what’s going on around you, to whatever potential dangers
might be in that situation, but after you’re out of that moment, when
you’re preparing for the next time you go out and film, you really feel a
deep responsibility. To me it was always a deep responsibility to the
people that I photograph more than anything else. If I mess up a shot,
if I have my settings wrong on my camera or something, that feels like a
big loss to me because I feel like I’ve left people down that I’m
trying to capture their story. So, it is a responsibility and I think it
does weigh on you, but as you do the job more you learn what you need
to do to get it right and, hopefully, the vast majority of the times you
do get it right. A lot of times if you don’t, if you’re able to in some
way meet with that family gain and capture those pictures again, that’s
great. A lot of times you don’t have that luxury of being able to have a
second chance and you have to work with what you have. But of course, I
think we all want to capture images that are visually beautiful and
stunning because that’s what is going to bring people in to look at a
subject matter that they might otherwise want to ignore. There could be a
million articles on a subject matter out there for people to read about
and people might just not even want to bother with reading however many
paragraphs the article is, but if they’re flipping through their
newspaper or magazine an image just catches their field of vision for a
second, if that’s a beautifully captured image and it shows the emotion
of the scene, then hopefully you’ve given them a little lesson or
something that will stick in their mind or something that will make them
curious to kind of figure out what’s going on in that situation. For me
that’s what made me fall in love with photojournalism – just looking at
books of photos of humanitarian issues around the world and saying
“Wow! What’s happening there? Why is that happening? What does this
mean?” And then that pushed me to fight about this subject matter and
also pushed me to capture images that would make other people feel that
way.

SS: Have you ever found
yourself in the environment where locals were resentful to the idea of
being photographed? For instance, when you were shooting Palestinian
tunnels in Gaza didn’t they suspect you of being an Israeli spy sniffing
around?

ZM: Yeah, absolutely. People will
suspect you of a million different things and a lot of times you have to
prove yourself. There was a lot of times when I had to carry a
portfolio with me and show people the types of images that I captured
and what I’d done in order to try and gain their trust, and of course a
lot of times you’re unable to gain a certain person’s trust. In that
situation you have to move on. You can’t get everyone to trust you all
the time.

SS: You put yourself in
the line of danger multiple times, tell me – when you are in the middle
of war chaos and you take photos, were you ever scared that this is it?

ZM: Generally,
I’m scared to death before I go and when I get back – those are the
times that I allow myself to be scared. The first time I went to Iraq it
was the bloodiest time of the war and journalists were being killed at
an alarming rate and locals and military, the amount of death that was
happening when I chose to go in was just incredible, I had a really hard
time with that decision, and I was very scared. But the second you get
into the situation you let that go and you focus, because fear is not
doing you any good when you’re in this situation – you have to
concentrate, all of your attention has to be spent on what is going on
around me and what is going on with what I’m doing, an immense amount of
attention spent on, you know…

SS: How do you manage to keep your head cool when bullets are flying over it?

ZM: I
guess this is personal, I’m sure everybody deals with this in a
completely different way, but for me I just shut it down. In a way I had
to kind of think of myself in those situations as being invincible. I
just would say there’s nothing that’s going to harm me, I’m going to be
fine, there’s nothing I have to worry about and just do it. Because if
you start to let the fear take over you’re not going to go in and take
that photograph that you need to take, and you’re not going to put
yourself in some of the situations that you need to put yourself in to
document what’s going on. I guess you kind of psyche yourself out for it
and it’s kind of a meditative state, you go into it, you do what you
need to do. And as soon as you come out and you get back home, then
you’re having visits with your psychiatrist and you’re taking PTSD
medication, depression medication and you’re trying to deal with what
you just went through and how crazy it actually was.

SS: Would you risk your life for a good shot?

ZM: I
did many times. Whether I would at this point? I’m a lot older now than
I was. Like you said before, we don’t really know what the meaning of
these photos is, we don’t know what they’re going to change, we don’t
know if they’re going to make any difference. And I think that’s
something I’ve realized more as I’ve gotten older and I would reevaluate
decisions a bit more at this point in my life than I did in my late
twenties and early thirties when, you know, it was something that I was
so passionate about and believed in so much and didn’t really care what
the cost was. I think a lot of young people like myself kind of thought
of ourselves like bulletproof and I got lucky, a lot of other people
didn’t and are either not around anymore or are suffering from any
number of different injuries.

SS:
When you were embedded with the US force in Iraq, you stayed with
infantry troops and refused any special treatment as a photographer. In
the famous series “Generation Kill” the journalist who rides with the
Marines takes a gun when things go rough and shoots back. Did you ever
have to do something like that?

ZM: To take
a gun to get myself out of a situation? No, I’ve never had to act in a
combat role. I mean, I’ve had that training, I know how to use all the
equipment that they use in those situations, but… You know, I suppose if
my life really depended on it, then I would have to take those steps.
But luckily, I was never in a situation where I had to make that choice,
I was there as a journalist and for sure I didn’t want to take
someone’s life. That would be something that I would have a really hard
time living with.

SS:I
heard some war photographers say that they become addicted to war to the
point where they feel that they can’t help but go and work there again
and again. Has this happened to you?

ZM: It’s
something I very actively thought, that instinct. Because it is
extremely addictive on a number of different levels. The adrenaline is
something that’s easy to get addicted to. I think another thing that’s
really hard is when you come back from those situations, when you come
back from war zones and different countries – I’ve worked in 116
countries at this point – when I come back to the US and I’m around
friends who have wonderful, “normal” lives, it’s always hard to relate
to each other. I think they have a hard time picturing my life and what I
see and what I experience, and I have a hard time picturing what it’s
like to have a family and to live in one place and to come home to the
same bed every night. There’s a disconnect and it makes you feel kind of
more out of place when you’re home in a normal situation then when
you’re sleeping underneath a tank in a desert waiting for something
crazy to happen. So, it is very difficult mentally and I think everybody
that does this type of work will come out from it with some kind of
issues. I don’t think you can see these kinds of things and come out
unscathed. I think it’s important for young photographers and
journalists to know that.

SS: For
the past couple of years you’ve been working on this project called
Dollar Street that shows how others live at different income levels
around the world. Why did you decide to change the focus and drift away
from the war photography and go into that in particular?

ZM: Dollar
Street was a project which I really believed in from the beginning, it
was a subtle way of giving an immense amount of information to a great
number of people. This is a project that can be seen by anyone around
the world and used and studied for free. I spend a day with families in
different income groups and I photograph their lives – what a plate of
food looks like for them, what kind of toys their kids play with, what
their house looks like. This is now being used in schools around Africa,
it’s being viewed by people all around the world. I think the subtle
things are just as important. For someone here in the West to be able to
go and to see what it’s like to live in Burkina Faso in the bottom 2
percentile of the income bracket that’s – important. I think it’s
possibly just as important, or even more important than war imagery and
things that are very hard to look at.

SS: Zoriah, thank you very much for this interview, it’s been wonderful talking to you and having your insight.

ZM: Thank you, Sophie.

SS:
We were talking to Zoriah Miller, award-winning photographer who
travelled to crisis regions from Iraq to Haiti to document human
suffering there.